I was watching a video or two last night, documentary style stuff about peak oil etc, and I was watching it with the current squeeze.
Now, to get a perspective about me, you need to know a few things.
I guess I was fortunate enough to be born naturally intelligent and inquisitive, but then again, was I? Or was I just fortunate to be born to an engineer and go to a decent school and not have my natural “why why why” instincts shut down at an early age.
Good schooling or not, I left school at 17 and promptly found myself dabbling in drugs and motorcycles and rock and roll and the wrong side of the law, and pretty much everything I learned along the way since then I learned by myself.
The point I am trying to get across here is that I was not born to an academically gifted family with a silver spoon in my mouth and then spent my twenties in academia swotting up to become brane of brittan…
And yet….
And yet the gulf between my knowledge, and the knowledge of the current squeeze… well… vast does not even begin to cover it, to give a bad analogy it’s like I am a couple of Saturn V engines strapped to a tugboat, something is getting into orbit, even if it is only scrap metal by then, and there will be a decided lack of finesse or control, but what a ride, what a ride, whereas her indoors is like a 4 hp mariner outboard strapped to that same tugboat, it won’t even hold it against the wind or tide, anything more than a millpond and it is game over.
So the film about peak oil, she has never heard of it, never heard of ghawar, shale sands, brazilian ethanol, coal gas etc, distillation and cracking, water cut, has no idea just how many things oil is used for, vehicle fuel being the least of them, has no idea of the differences between an energy source like hydrogen and a fuel like coal, has never heard of power generating station base load, and has literally never even thought about the physical requirements of oil extraction, or coal extraction, etc etc, that you have to get more energy out than you are putting in, or it is game over.
And yet, she is not a stupid person, she does have a brain, it does work, when you present her with problems such as the above and explain them to her, she can understand the explanation and work out the consequences.
We will never run out of oil, in the sense that if you are prepared to pay enough, you will always be able to extract *some* for values of some that equate to inkjet printer ink prices, you just won’t be running *any* vehicle on it.
She is running around in an 03 Kia Rio, 1300 cc petrol 4 banger, I filled her fuel tank yesterday, 30 quid, it is an economical little vehicle, sure, it does not get the mpg of a modern diesel, but it doesn’t get the service and maintenance costs either.
I’m running around on a 1700 cc petrol 2 banger motorcycle, filling my tank takes 20 quid, and I get less mpg than she does, that’s what you get when you stage iv tune a big harley lump.
I was explaining to her that at $150 a barrel, it doesn’t matter what we drive, a vehicle that does 50 mpg is no more use than a vehicle that does 30 mpg, the only thing that makes a difference is getting 100 mpg out of a Honda C90, and then what happens when oil goes to £190 a barrel?
Nor can you change the production process, you have to blend your crudes and then fractionally distill them, and make lube oil, heavy oil, diesel, kerosene, gasoline, white spirit, etc etc etc, you have to make *all* the constituent components, and if there is no demand for any of them except for example diesel, then the cost of making all the others gets dumped on the diesel.
She laughed at the 40 mile range of plug in hybrids, my mate has a brand new mitsubishi one, what use is 40 miles range, she drives 100 miles to work, so electric vehicles are no good.
5 miles is walking range, as in, that is as far as you will walk to work and back, and if oil is $150 a barrel that will be the choice.
Then we watch a film about the credit bubble, and in todays news the Indian Tata owned Port Talbot steel plant in wales is set to close, it’s cheaper to import steel from China, so when there is no more manufacturing in walking distance, or c90 commute distance, what do you do for manufacturing when oil hits $150?
Amazon goes out of business overnight, so does Domino’s pizza delivery, so does Tesco delivery, so does Tesco itself.
What do you eat, what do you wear, what do you wash with, what do you do to earn these things?
Physics is what decides the answers, that and simple math and so on, and no, the answers do NOT have to include your feewings on the matter.
Fallout 4 apocalypse can happen, could happen this year, and all it takes to make it happen is physics.
You know, we cannot even roll out fucking broadband to everyone, and by broadband I mean proper broadband, fiber to the home or street cabinet in your street, how the fuck are we going to wire an electricity infrastructure capable of delivering 50 kWh per person per day to the home?
Where the fuck are we going to get that energy from, seeing as massive nuclear generation capacity is the only possible option, and I do NOT mean the current generation of uranium powered plants, they are only a stop gap for a century at best, just like oil was.
Physics denotes certain immutable facts, it is not Mad Max bartertown, that is fucking horseshit, to generate or produce higher levels of energy then of necessity you need bigger and more complex central installations and technology, you absofucking lutely *require* certain economies of scale, one man cannot build and operate an oil well and fractional distillation plant, mad max says 20 can do it, I call bullshit, and just out of camera shot you need an engineering community able to produce specialist steels, able to machine them to tolerances, able to do glassmaking, able to make gaskets, you need a synthetic materials production and machining facility, you need electronics manufacture, 5,000 people could maybe do it, if they had outside help to start up.
Tesla / Musk, basically everything is bought in, they do not go and mine ores and refine them and then make materials and then machine them and then have raw stock of aluminium which they then machine on cnc mills that they made themselves.
And yet even with a bottomless pit of money and no real need to make a profit, how unreal is that, Tesla motors still directly employs north of 12,000 people.
Just to make a fucking electric car for fucks sake, and they have only made 50,000 of them… and unlike the humble c90, the batteries are already going off like cream cakes left out.
Honda have made over 65 fucking MILLION c90’s
And they didn’t mine their own ore either.
Start a new car company in wales tomorrow and where are you going to buy your steel from? Not Port Talbot, so that will be importing from Poland or India or China then eh, what could possibly go wrong with your supply chain?
To be sure, like oil, you will always be able to buy steel, the question is, at what price?
There is a thread over on the harley tech forums now about mebbe it is time to sell stock in the company… you think?
Lots of commenters said HD jumped the shark when it cost more than US$25,000 to roll a new heavyweight cruiser off the lot, and they are right, but they are only right now, when interest rates are at 0%, I can remember being quoted 32% APR to buy a new motorcycle back in the late seventies, thankfully I walked away from that “deal”, at that rate over 3 years the $25k hog becomes a $55k hog and it don’t matter how Dennis Hopper I fancy myself, that is just too fucking much, so HD volume production will go down, and unit costs will go up, supply chain and materials costs will go up, $125k harley anyone?
It’s like £250k houses here, they aren’t selling, even on 0% interest only liar loans, you can still BUY a house, peak oil passim, there isn’t a shortage per se, I could buy a house with vacant tenancy within 5 miles today, I just can’t buy an affordable one that I could meet the payments on.
And like the harley, the fucking house ain’t gonna earn me any money (flipping aside) whereas the laser has at least earned me back every penny I paid for it, and then some… so I have a harley and a laser and a 48″ telly and Fallout 4 automatron and a rented 700 square feet pad / workshop in a shitty area of town and most importantly NO FUCKING DEBT.
Hell, the laser just paid for two new iridium spark plugs for the harley and last week new front calipers and disks for the Kia, a fucking 13 year old car, for which there is no such thing as a service kit for the calipers, so you cannot refurb and rebuild them, you must replace them and throw the old ones away.
Same shit with brake pads, the metal backing plates are perfect, it used to be a piece of piss to take off the old friction material and glue and rivet on new.
I found myself stuck down on on the peloponnisos peninsula of greece in the early / mid nineties with a harley shovel with a shot rear brake, at that time people were split there, some were “oh wow a fucking harley davidson” and others were “no fucking way that is a real harley davidson, it *must* be a fake” and yet I found a local small garage and they were able to take my old pads off, grind the fucking friction material off them and cut and shape some new pad material from stock and then glue and rivet that to my old pad backing plates, and my brakes were fixed for thousands of miles.
You see how *FAST* shit is going to shit. Twenty fucking years man, from being able to fix and repair and refurb basic stuff like brake pads, in bum fuck nowhere in Greece, to fuck it, chill your heels while someone ships the spares to you, may take a couple of days, may take a week.
If you cannot fucking REPAIR something as simple as fucking brake pads and shoes, what the fuck are you gonna do with complex shit like a steel plant or an oil refinery or a power station or suchlike?
In my old job as IT bod I used to go to various plants around here, places that were basically factories that processed and made foodstuffs, meats, poultry, breads, cheeses, sweets, you name it, big name companies like 2 sisters and kraft and heinz, and somewhere on site there was always an Eriks office, they did the onsite maintenance, couplings fittings wheels bearings you name it, if something broke or wore out onsite, the Eriks guys fixed it for the factory, which outsourced and subcontracted it out.
In one of my first jobs as sifter at the old Rank Hovis bakery, they had an in house maintenance department that could and did fix anything on site, from the production machinery to the plumbing in the staff toilets, and by “fix” I do not mean looked in a catalog and ordered part number 12345678990 and sat back waiting for it to arrive.
It’s why when I took the IT job I was happy with it, thinking to myself here is a recession proof job, some cunt is always going to need some cunt like me to physically go on site and do the actual work.
It was only after 3 years there that it dawned on me, I was also a part in a catalog, meanwhile the companies at the job kept outsourcing and acquiring and merging with each other, and my company starts hiring people on £13,000 + a company car to do my job, and the one thing nobody gave a fuck about was the differences between me and them which is why when I started one job every two weeks failed on the first visit, and by the time I left one job every two weeks was fixed on the first visit, and nobody gives a fuck.
My mistake was sure, *they* will always need *some* cunt to turn up on site and do the actual hands on repairs, but that some one does not have to be me, and the terms and conditions under which I took the job do not have to be immutable, *everything* can change, I was a fungible commodity.
There will always be *some* cunt willing to do it, some cunt will do it for £9,000 a year + a company car, and live in the fucking car if necessary… because they sure as fuck won’t be paying rent then.
Hell, times and places in my life, I’d have swapped places with a guy who could curl up in the back of a modern car in the cold and rain in winter and burn company fuel with the engine ticking over running the heater and sleep the night away.
Ain’t no good quoting “physics” and looking up at crumbling edifices and saying they are all gonna fall without also checking your own footing, and the footprint in which those edifices will fall.
It’s sobering.
Back when I was a lot younger, if not quite a boy any longer, there was a certain self apportioned smug mystique to being the bad boy on the monster (74 cu in / 1200 cc) harley bad boy’s motorsickle, I’m old enough to admit that shit now with a straight face and a small grin.
Now I’m in my mid fifties and I ain’t growed up a lick it seems, the bad boy is still on a harley, cept its 103 cubic inch now, and certainly don’t get 65 mpg on a run, mebbe half that… that’s what happens when you tune the shit out of something that was never meant to be tuned.. it’s the last blaze of glory, party heary while rome burns, I (and those like me) are the end of a fucking era, go get all nostalgic as you like about it, it’s all bullshit except the fact that it is the end of an era.
Cept there are lots of associated era’s that I am also the end of, we all are, essentially free (oil) energy and essentially free money is coming to an end, and in physics terms whenever you get large multiples back out of anything you put in you’re gettin’ free bud, let me tell ya…
cheap and free are incestuous cousins who fuck each other every night in every hole.
expensive is a distant relative that pops up on WAYN, you heard something about that distant side of the family, but you never actually met or spoke to the bastards.
Meanwhile I started a small laser business and bought a laser, thinking it’s all gonna be local dude, so I named it locally and thought about it locally and all that jazz, and I have a job to do now for a guy, also a small business, but he is 250 road miles away, and that centre of the world economy London is in between us, and I’ve had quite a few like that.
I guess if you can refurbish brake pads people will come to find you no matter where you are, and it makes me happy for myself and my immediate business prospects, but it also fills me with fear.
I’m getting enquiries from people asking me to do shit because their usual supplier has upped their MOQ (minimum order quantities/conditions) even though I quite clearly state that I do not do that particular thing.
I had a local company get a quote for 300 quid and then pass me by an dgive the job to someone 500 miles away in scotland, because I also quoted them 20 quid next day delivery, as in job done and delivered next day, or 10 quid for 3 day delivery.
Both of these are already feeling the squeeze, they both need to make X as a cut on the job, non negotiable, if X = 50 quid and my pricing makes X = 49 quid then they won’t go with me, they will keep looking anywhere to find someone who can give them their 50 quid cut, fuck the servive, fuck the quality, fuck the future.
But I can get what are basically 1 mm 304 stainless dog tags cut for 20p a pop inc materials locally, if I order 1,000 at a time, bitchez aren’t making any profit doing that, trust me.
Physics is a bitch, me being more flexible and adaptable that acme corp or their employees down the road, that ain’t all win-win for me, because I live in the same society as acme corp and they employees down the road, and when that edifice comes a tumblin down, well you didn’t see no hot dog vendors making a killing amongst the dust and debris of the twin towers collapse selling gritty dawgs with extra hot sauce and concrete dust topping.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not sitting here saying I’m in my mid fifties so I don’t care too much any more, I still wanna live to be a thousand and be able to fuck hot young sluts and be a bad boy on my murdercycle and play Fallout 4, am saying thank fuck I’m in my mid fifties and not my teens, because at least I lived through those glory years when everything was effectively free, an era today’s teen can only dream about…
My kids will *never* know the glory of riding a harley across europe and spending the summer in greece drinking and partying.
Which means they will *never* have the memories of other good times to fall back on when things get tough, which they do ocassionally… no matter how tough things were, and at times they were, I had literally nothing but the clothes on my back and no future no friends no job and no place to go more than once, I can put my hand on my heart and tell you I never believed for a moment that at some point in the future things would not get better.
I hadn’t ridden my last harley, had my last great blowjob, smoked my last cigar, drunk my last beer, may not have known how or when the next one would come along, but never doubted the possibility was there, sometime in the future.
Which brings me, as I do, in a roundabout way to something apparently completely unconnected, to this;
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3517838/KATIE-HOPKINS-changing-sex-makes-Caitlyn-Jenner-hero-business-politicians-women-bodies.html
well bitch, it’s not YOUR fucking body we are talking about here, it is the body of the unborn human being fetus that we are saying is NOT YOU and therefore NOT YOUR BODY and therefore you should NOT be allowed to KILL it as casually as you would cut your own hair.
You see the “physics” problem inherent here, albeit it is biology in this case, it is still SCIENCE and FACT, by definition, a fetus us a separate biological entity to the mammalian mother from the moment of conception onwards.. don’t like it, don’t get fucking pregnant.
Which neatly brings us to this story;
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3518934/Student-feminist-group-Campus-Witches-attack-man-eats-lunch-harassed-ex-Twitter.html
Well, shall I await the incarceration of all these skanks for a consipracy to commit assault and get 6 years hard time each, and for all the jeering (many mangina niggerz no doubt) onlookers to be similarly charged for inciting hatred and sexual abuse?
Won’t be holding my breath.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3518353/Pornhub-research-reveals-types-porn-women-searching-world.html
So really, this is what WIMMINZ be watching porn wise, it seems only the ukranian and russian chicks think I have anything to offer them.
Fine by me bitchez, “her indoors” is one of the few that woke up early, smelled the coffee, and decided 24/7 ownership (for the duration, I haven’t lost my fucking mind quite yet, hopefully dementia is many years away, hopefully coincident with the apocalypse so I am not aware of what the fuck is going down) by yours truly was the way to go and the way to survive the future.
She watches the peak oil and credit bubble films and asks me if I can cope and survive, and by extension keep her safe, I smile, the obedience and loyalty now isn’t just paying your dues and savings into that bank, it’s training too, and y’all can quit any time you like, because even though I *like* you being around as long as you stay my bitch, it is still an extra burden on me, an extra responsibility, one I can function quite well without, thank you very much.
Really, 99.9% of wimminz had the potential to be my bitch, just that somewhere between birth and now they stocked up on all that you go girl bullshit, and completely ignored all that real world shit like spending less than you earn and being loyal to those who you want to keep near.
My brother’s stepdaughter is now of an age to drive, so what does the little princess want, why, a new (BMW) mini cooper, and his argument against it is that the insurance would be too high, how about a regular new bmw mini instead?
I mean what the fucking fuck, I had to get TWO fucking jobs, one full time day job and one evening job working the bar, to convince my old man to go GUARANTOR on a fucking loan so I could buy a second hand motorcycle, with the serious and very fucking real warning that if he ever had to pay one red cent on that loan I was dead to him forever…. and he fucking meant it, and it was that more than anything else that convinced me not to take that 32% APR loan, and instead save up and buy for cash a series of steaming piles of shit that I had to learn to maintain and try and keep on the road and so on.
25 years since the old bastard died, and I am so fucking grateful that I *took* and *made* the opportunity to know him and work with him as a man, 25 years after he dies and shit he taught me is still helping me to keep my shit together and be an independent man.
He taught me physics and maths and not so much literally but you know what I mean, he taught me real world physical and mathematical shit, and I respect the old bastard *more* every day he is gone, not less.
I’m a dinosaur, a still (just about) living and breathing fossil, deal with it.
I don’t have any answers, just strategies that work for an old fart that has already done a shit load of living, I didn’t start this fire of free oil and free energy and free money, and while I may have lived off it for a while, as an engineer I still put in waaaaaay more than I ever fucking got out, so don’t expect me to act like a fireman and put it out now your free shit world is starting to burn down, I’m after saving *my* cute little ass, that’s it dude.
Physics.
My legs were designed to carry one person, me.
Filed under: Wimminz 
